Israeli Team To No Longer Send Another Spacecraft To The Moon

By Maria Petersen on June 29, 2019

SpaceIL, the Israeli nonprofit agency, has declared that it will dump plans for a second moonshot after an accident during the landing previously this spring in its initial mission. During that time, the firm claimed that it might make a second effort to make a Moon landing, but a tweet from its official account on Twitter this week claims that the team will rather carry on building the Beresheet 2 spacecraft for a different mission.

The initial Beresheet made its journey on April 11, 2019, to the Moon. But it failed to stick the landing only moments prior to the spacecraft got near Moon’s surface. “As per preliminary probe of the Beresheet’s landing plan, it seems that a manual instruction was given into the computer of spacecraft,” SpaceIL claimed to the media in an interview. “This resulted in a chain reaction in the spacecraft, due to which the primary engine turned off, which stopped it from moving further.”

In spite of the accident, SpaceIL is referring its April mission a “record-breaking, successful journey,” stating that “an effort to repeat a voyage to the Moon is not sufficed of a challenge,” claimed the media.

In the meantime, other private agencies are still mulling over their Moon landing missions projected for as early as 2020, comprising firms such as Pittsburgh-located Astrobotic and Japan’s ispace. Apart from Astrobotic, NASA has also chose two extra firms to send robotic landers to the Moon—Intuitive Machines and Orbit Beyond.

On a related note, NASA this week verified that the Curiosity rover lately identified the “biggest amount of methane ever seen at the time of a mission.” The amounts were sufficient to halt the activities of the rover as researchers wanted more answers: Methane is a gas normally created by life as we are aware of, after all, and it can be a hint of life on the planet.

Maria Petersen, one who a true enthusiast of the space, universe, and the outer world, has pursued a degree in Astrophysics. And this has made her an apt choice to write about the world of Science. Beginning a career in writing as a freelancer and then, gradually with hard work and passion, earned the position of Editor And Writer in our organization. Also loves to be called Content Crafter, Maria is given the responsibility to write blogs and news articles related to the Science field, entailing new findings & discoveries, inventions & innovations, new satellite & spacecraft liftoffs, galaxies & outer space, and much more.